The Cords of Vanity (Barnes & Noble Digital Library)

By James Branch Cabell

This 1909 novel is narrated by Robert Etheridge Townsend, a young Southern writer recounting a life of wealth and leisure in the waning years of the nineteenth century.  It is a gentle but not un-barbed satire of manners that skewers snobbery and convenience marriages.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barnes & Noble
• Release date: Mar 22, 2011
• ISBN: 9781411444317

James Branch Cabell

James Branch Cabell (1879-1958) was an American writer of escapist and fantasy fiction. Born into a wealthy family in the state of Virginia, Cabell attended the College of William and Mary, where he graduated in 1898 following a brief personal scandal. His first stories began to be published, launching a productive decade in which Cabell’s worked appeared in both Harper’s Monthly Magazine and The Saturday Evening Post. Over the next forty years, Cabell would go on to publish fifty-two books, many of them novels and short-story collections. A friend, colleague, and inspiration for such writers as Ellen Glasgow, H.L. Mencken, Sinclair Lewis, and Theodore Dreiser, James Branch Cabell is remembered as an iconoclastic pioneer of fantasy literature.

Reviews for The Cords of Vanity (Barnes & Noble Digital Library)

[wirkman_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is probably the one book by Cabell the critics like least . . . or is that "detest the most"? It is the tale of an on-the-make lover, Robert Townshend, and his trail of courting young women, one by one. The book is written in the first person. It relates a series of liaisons not so much dangerous as callous and calculating. And yet, in the back of the narrator's mind, this indication that he's missing something. The comedy reaches its highest point in a clash of mutual betrayal by two lovers who engage in love only to make literature of it. This is one of the funnier moments in Cabell's oeuvre, though, perhaps, it does not redeem a novel from what, in its day, was its obvious immorality. Today, of course, most readers would be bored, and see not so much immorality as too much talk.Times have changed. I'm afraid I still like the book, though.